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More and more Canadian healthcare companies see the benefit of leveraging social media for their businesses. Here is a really interesting example that caught my attention because it encompasses what is critical for a successful social media campaign: lots of interaction and viral effectiveness. It also appears to follow the Canadian regulatory guidelines. Learn more about the Cold-FX social media campaign here.

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Afexa Life Sciences, a medium-sized Canadian company with a variety of over-the-counter (OTC) products, has launched a fun social media campaign in November 2009 to leverage their sponsorship of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, BC (“Cold-FX: Official cold and flu remedy of the 2010 Winter Games”). Cold-FX is the brand that is sponsoring the Olympics and is the backbone of this fun social media campaign.

There are 3 components to this campaign;

1) a FaceBook fanpagewith over 800 fans within 3 months and most importantly a high level of engagement by the fans,

3) a very popular ‘Athlete of the Year’ video which can be customized with your name, or that of a friend. The video was launched on November 19th and as of December 4, has already been viewed over 28,000 times (Source: Data on file, Afexa Life Sciences).

If you look through the FaceBook and Twitter posts by Afexa, you will notice that there is no mention of the brand Cold-FX. All of the posts by Afexa are related to their Olympics Trivia game.

Moreover, the ‘Athlete of the Year’ video has only a minimal amount of branding as well, as shown in the photo below.

Cold-FX 'Athlete of the Year' viral video

(… and for the record, the only way that I could be recognized for any athletic skills whatsoever would be if running after a 2-year old while talking on the phone with a client and taking notes of our discussion were a sport … thank goodness I have the most understanding and wonderful clients in the world …)

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On Friday December 4th, I had an opportunity to speak with Justin Jones (Director Digital Strategy) and Hardeep Gosal (Online Community Manager) of Afexa Life Sciences to discuss their Cold-FX social media campaign. Here are a few highlights of our discussion:

New to social media: The Cold-FX campaign is the first social media campaign for the company.

Taking small steps at a time: They started by monitoring to find out where their consumers were online, what they were saying about the brand, the sentiments of their comments and the reach of forwarded messages.

Deliberately being conservative: The main objective of the campaign is to build relationships with the consumers, therefore messages are kept neutral and non-branded to give the consumers an opportunity to get to know the company and feel comfortable to communicate with them.

The snapshot below was taken of the Cold-FX Twitter profile at the end of the day on December 7 2009. It demonstrates the neutral, non-branded messages being posted by the company. As for the design of the Twitter profile, the only branding consists of the “Cold-FX” name found on the left and the right side of the screens.

Cold-FX Twitter profile

Selling the idea to senior management: 1) Showed them the analysis of a full year’s worth of social media monitoring, and 2) presented a variety of real cases.

Building up a follower-base is a long process but well worth the time and effort.

Company wide initiative:

Approximately 16 months prior to the launch of the social media campaign, all employees had an opportunity to discuss their feelings, knowledge and comfort level with social media. Justin captured the corporation’s learning culture by stating that: “The more we educate our employees about visual technologies, internet, mobile technology, social media, the more internal support we are likely to gain in the months ahead for our social media campaign.”

Training then took place to educate our employees on the use of social media.

Firewalls do not block employees from logging onto social media networks at work, although there is a social media policy in place to avoid abuse.

As part of their social media policy, Afexa Life Sciences’ employees are encouraged to not talk about product or anything financial.

Followers’ engagement with the company via social networks is creating a lot of positive energy and excitement in the organization, and employees are motivated by this.

Biggest challenge in managing a social media campaign: Being new to social media, the organization expects to make mistakes and learn from them. However, the social networks frequently change the landscape, rules and regulations. To work through these changes, the organization is partnering with suppliers who maintain a close pulse on upcoming changes within the various social networks in order to help predict and manage upcoming changes.

Afexa reacted quickly by launching a FaceBook application on December 9 2009, which now allows them to continue their trivia contest on FaceBook while staying within the FaceBook policies. Just check out the ‘Trivia Contest’ tab on their FaceBook page and you will be brought to the new application.

Measuring ROI: Be clear on your objective for implementing a social media tactic and determine ROI measurements based on that information. Afexa’s main objective for the Cold-FX social media campaign is not financial. Instead, the main objective is to build relationships with consumers. Some of the measurements for this campaign consist of;

Number of followers

Frequency of engagement

Sentiments of consumer communications online

Click-through to the Cold-FX website

5 Key Learnings from Afexa Life Sciences:

Leverage monitoring tools to see what people are saying about your brand and the general sentiment of their communications, as well as identify demographics of the consumers who are talking about your brand online and what platforms they are using.

Stay focused on 1 or 2 social media platforms rather than all of them. Go through the experience with the selected platforms, learn from it, and then scale onto other platforms if your objectives direct you that way.

Leverage partners who are dealing with some of the social networks that your brand is involved with. Dealing with a company that has an idea of upcoming policies will save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

From an internal organizational perspective, take the time to carefully draft a social media policy and respect everybody’s level of comfort with social media when presenting internally.

Embrace social media. Social media is here whether we like it or agree with it. Google Sidewiki is a perfect example; people can comment on your brands or organization whether you give them the platform to do so or not.

Hardeep summed it up nicely with the following comment:

“The conversation is already happening with your product, so why not get involved. Companies are often afraid of negative feedback, but we have found that brand advocates balance the conversation with positive comments. Brand advocates -see who they are and develop relationships with them.”

Regulatory considerations for the Cold-FX social media campaign:Cold-FX is approved in Canada as a Natural Health Product, therefore it has more flexibility than a prescription product in terms of regulatory guidelines in its promotions. I asked Ray Chepesiuk, the PAAB Commissioner, for his regulatory insights with regards to this campaign. Here was his response;

“The Cold-FX social media campaign is brilliant and appears to be well within the regulatory guidelines. You can do a lot more with consumers with an NPN product from a regulatory perspective because you can actually advertise with claims. You can talk about your drug, but the only caution is to make sure that fair balance is included and indications stated correctly in accordance with the product’s license. It appears that Afexa Life Sciences have respected the linkage policies of Health Canada in this campaign. If there is promotion, they must follow section 9(1) of the Health Canada’s Food and Drugs Act.”

Kudos to Afexa Life Sciences for taking on this initiative with passion and enthusiasm, and for giving a chance to their consumers to have so much fun with the campaign.

GIVEAWAY: Afexa Life Sciences has kindly offered to give away 5 COLD-FX Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games Hockey 3-Pin Sets to those who write comments about this post. For those who decide to write a comment, I will be in touch with you to gather your shipping information (so please do not include that information as part of the comment). If more than 5 people write comments, then we’ll have to make it a draw in which case everybody who writes a comment will be given a number (ie. the 1st to write a post is assigned the number ‘1’, and so on) and then will be randomly selected with the use of the random number generator Random.org. Deadline is Wednesday December 16th, 11:59 pm. Draw (if required depending on number of comments) will take place on Thursday December 17th(to give us enough time to ship you the pin-sets in time for the holidays if you plan on giving as a gift).

DISCLOSURE: Afexa Life Sciences has not paid me to write this article, is not a client and has not requested a business pitch from me.